So. This past weekend, Your Humble Blogger completed the run of Pygmalion and had a birthday. Closing night was the eve of what I’ve come to think of as my first thirty-ninth birthday. This confluence (and, um, some alcoholic intake) led me to brood over endings and passings. I’m not going to be doing another show with that gang, and I’m not going to be in my mid-thirties anymore, either.
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The gang are pretty terrific. This is my third show with the same director and stage manager, and four castmates have joined me in all three of them, another one in two of the three. All good people. And the actors who I met for this show were good people, too; they were the sort of people I would want<\/I> to be in three shows with. And it’s possible, if unlikely, that I will be in a show with one of them again someday, or even two. But not more than that. I am not driving sixty miles to rehearsals again; that was crazy.
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Before doing those three shows, I had stopped doing theater for about ten years. I left college with the idea of becoming a professional actor; I soon discovered that I didn’t actually want to be a professional actor. I still enjoyed theater, though, and for a few years, I did shows at the community theater level. I found that level frustrating. Many people who do community theater are more interested in socializing with their friends in the group than in working on a show, which infuriated YHB, who still attempted to maintain a professional attitude (vaddevah I thought dat meant). The production values were often terrible, not only because of a shoestring budget but because nobody cared about the lights, or the sound, or the stage management. I didn’t have a whole lot of fun.
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When I walked in to auditions for The Man Who Came to Dinner<\/I>, I had determined that I wouldn’t make myself angry about professionalism. If I had a good time, and we put on a decent show, that would be fine. In fact, we put on a terrific show, and although the cast wasn’t in the least professional, we had a good time and worked hard. So I did another show, with most of the same people, and it was great. Since I was a lead this time, it was more work for me, but enjoyable work, and we had a terrific time and put on a good show in the end. Then I moved from Western Connecticut to Greater Hartford, and welcomed the Youngest Member, and took another couple of years off theater. And then our director told me she was doing Pygmalion<\/I>, and my Best Reader said that technically, it wasn’t actually impossible. And once again, I worked hard and had a good time, and the show was good. But I also spent three hours a day in the car, and I missed dinner with my family four days a week for two months, not to mention the kids’ bedtime, and my Best Reader lost two months of work on her book because she was single-parenting while I was driving. So that won’t happen again.
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I keep coming back to the definition of middle-age that I came across recently: it’s the time of life when people stop thinking about the future in terms of what they will be able to do, and start thinking about the future in terms of what they won’t be able to do. There’s youth, of course, when every year or two there’s some new thing you are admitted to: middle-school, movies on your own, driving, dating, voting, draft age, credit cards, car rental, drinking, sex, a real job, your own apartment, marriage, home ownership, promotion, parenthood. At thirty-five, you are qualified to be President of the United States, and that’s the last one until you start getting discounts. Your Humble Blogger is thirty-nine at last; there's the house, the children, a job, my Best Reader’s career. I’ve got a wonderful life; I am clam-happy. And middle-aged.
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Do I want to go and visit family across the country? I can do that, thank the Divine, as long as I budget for it, and arrange it so that the Perfect Non-Reader doesn’t miss too much school. And of course I can’t just crash on somebody’s sofa anymore, because of my back (and my knee), so I need to either stay with somebody who has a guest room or take a hotel room, and there has to be enough room for the Perfect Non-Reader, and somewhere for the Youngest Member, too, and if we all share a room, nobody’s going to get much sleep, and you know? The hell with it.
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That’s what I mean by middle-aged<\/I>. It’s not chronological, it’s a combination of life’s circumstances and frame of mind. And I’m in it.
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The important thing is to remember that I am in the middle-aged frame of mind because I've got<\/I> so many wonderful things. I don’t want to be eighteen anymore, or twenty-three or even thirty. I want to have what I’ve got: a family, a home town, a settled life, immovables, habits, comforts. That’s not a bad thing.
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And while the knee hurts a lot, and the back is always vulnerable, and the extra forehead limits my choice of hairstyle, the stamina is just about where it should be at this point, I’m still at the point where the physical plant problems are an inconvenience, rather than a barrier or a burden, something to keep in mind rather than something that can’t be ignored. So that’s all right, d’y’see?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger invites you to grow middle-aged along with him, the best is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201,209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18491,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11429\/revisions\/18491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}